What exactly do people mean when they say that the computer "learns" to do something?
Your confusion is a result of Moravec’s Paradox; the just tell it to... step is enormously more difficult than it sounds. So what researchers do is attempt to find a general approach to that problem. The problem is expressed as a matrix of numbers (a grid that may be a million on each side these days) and “learning” is the process of computing the values for each of those numbers. Obviously no human can solve an equation like that, so a machine solver is used. Therefore the work of the AI researcher is to find better ways to generate these large matrices i.e. to express go to X and to create better solvers. The holy grail is a matrix and a solver that will work for any X.